Recently I’ve been involved with building a hardware device consisting of a cluster of low-power PC servers. The boards chosen for this particular project aren’t enterprise or embedded -style boards with specialist features like out of band (power) management (like Dell’s iDRAC or Intel’s AMT) so I started thinking about how to approximate something similar.

It’s also a little reminiscent of STONITH (Shoot The Other Node In The Head), used for aspects of the Linux-HA (High Availability) services.

The relays are rated for switching up to 35V at 8A – easily handling the 19V @ 2A for the mini server boards I’m remote managing.

The other handy thing to notice is that the Arduino by its nature is serial-enabled, meaning you can control it very simply using a USB connection to the management system without needing any more shields or adapters.

Lastly it’s worth mentioning that the relays are effectively SPDT switches so have connections for circuit open and closed. In my case this is useful as most of the time I don’t want the relays to be energised, saving power and prolonging the life of the relay.

The example Arduino code below opens a serial port and collects characters in a string variable until a carriage-return (0x0D) before acting, accepting commands “on”, “off” and “reset”. When a command is completed, the code clears the command buffer and flips voltages on the digital pins controlling the relays. Works a treat – all I need to do now is splice the power cables for the cluster compute units and run them through the right connectors on the relay boards. With the draw the cluster nodes pull being well within the specs of the relays it might even be possible to happily run two nodes through each relay.

There’s no reason why this sort of thing couldn’t be used for many other purposes too – home automation or other types of remote management, and could obviously be activated over ethernet, wifi or bluetooth instead of serial – goes without saying for a relay board -duh!

Next you need to download a third-party add-on repository for Kodi. Download XLordKX Repo zip into a folder onto the Slice. I did this from another computer and copied it into a network share served from the Slice.

I set mine to Website Version: UK and left everything else as defaults. Feed it your Amazon username & password and off you go.

The navigation is a little flakey which is a common Kodi/XBMC problem but the streaming seems fully functional – no problems on anything I’ve tried so far. I also see no reason why this wouldn’t work on raspbmc or openelec on a plain old Raspberry Pi. Happy streaming!

HT https://seo-michael.co.uk/tutorial-how-to-install-amazon-prime-instant-video-xbmc-kodi/ where I found instructions for Kodi in general.

Recently we’ve been exploring our customers’ user journeys, mapping out their touchpoints and reevaluating how we engage in the user experience of everything we do both digitally and in the physical world. Part of that requires the use of personas – model customers who in theory fulfil various different criteria in order to test the functionality and experiences of those digital touch points. I couldn’t help thinking about that and wondering which persona I might fit into in some nutjob’s head at Apple. Here are my first 12 hours’ experience with the much talked about Apple Watch.

As a bit of background: I’ve used work-owned Mac Laptops with OSX for 11 of the last 13 years but once made the mistake of spending my own money on an iPhone 3G, my first smartphone, which I hated more than I liked and swore never to buy another Apple device.

0900 Arrive at the office, coffee, email.

1000 Done responding to email for now. Time to look at what’s in the new box on my desk this morning. Ooh an Apple Watch. Great!

It’s heavy. Really heavy. The box is heavy, the plastic case is heavy, the magnetic charger is heavy. I think someone told Apple Heavy = Quality or something. I requested the smaller 38mm watch as my wrists are pretty thin and I didn’t want it to look ridiculous. The watch is small in width and height but it’s heavy. And fat – looks like a toy of some sort. Heavy, clunky, ugly. The leather strap feels it’s made of the same foam as my childrens’ play mats. The buckle is flabby and horrible. The face is already covered in fingerprints – I thought these things were oleophobic.

At least it came charged though, mostly because my IT Support team wanted a laugh and took it out of the box to play with earlier.

1030 meetings until 1200.

1200 Turn it on. It asks me to choose English (UK) as my preferred language fifteen times for some unknown reason.

1210 Meetings until 1400.

1400 I know it’s an Apple device and they’re very well known for being “open”. Not. Is there any way in the known universe to make it pair with my S6 Edge?
Read some webpages.

2045 Try and set up the iPhone. Needs Wifi. Try to type in my long WPA code using the soft keyboard. Three attempts before typing it right – keyboard is noticeably less responsive than the S6 as well as being much smaller and non-Swype (yeah yeah, non-security-compromised, haha).

2050 Past the wifi setup screen. Yes!

Won’t proceed without a SIM. Full Fiscal Shambles! I can register a Galaxy without a SIM. Why must I have one for an iPhone? What happens if I use a SIM from something else? Is it locked somehow?

2055 No idea. Let’s try. Extract the SIM from my old S3. It’s a mini SIM. Too big. Don’t really want to cut it down as it’s already cut down from a fullsize one and I won’t be able to put it back in my S3.

2058 I wonder if I have something other than my S6 has a micro sim. Losing the will to live.

2100 Look for iPad everywhere in the house.

2110 Realise child has pinched iPad to play Clash of Clans and hidden it somewhere. Look for child.

2122 Complete watch setup. Manage to zoom in the app that tells the time. Can’t unzoom it. Didn’t read the instructions two seconds ago about how to unzoom. Can’t figure out what the magic pinch-press-zoom-standonhead combination is. I guess I need to hold Apple-Meta-Cmd or something.

2123 Press all the buttons at once and repeatedly in various combinations. Discover scrollwheel strafes across the display. Wow that’s a really horrible interaction.

2130 Have no content on iPhone to drive Watch applications.

2140 Get bored. Throw it in the bin. What a PoC.

2150 Realise we’re supposed to be writing Metrichor apps for it. Fish it out of the bin ready to give to the developers. Should set the project back a couple of months.

Update 2015-06-26
How could I forget? There is one thing I like – the UK plug with the retractable pins – finally! Sorry Samsung, only retracting one out of three pins doesn’t cut it.

I love using Geckoboard. I love using Jenkins. I do have a few issues connecting the two though.

My Jenkins build cluster sits inside my corporate network and while there is a Jenkins plugin for Geckoboard it will only connect to Jenkins instances it can see on the public internet. I haven’t yet found a Geckoboard plugin for Jenkins to push results out through either. One day soon I’ll be annoyed enough to learn some Java and write one but until then I have a hack.

The core configurations of most of my Jenkins jobs runs approximately on these lines:

make deb && scp *deb deb-repo.my.net:/var/www/apt/incoming/

i.e. build a .deb (for Ubuntu) and if successful, copy and queue it for indexing by reprepro on my .deb repository server.

Now in Geckoboard I can configure a 1×1 Custom Text widget for PUSH data and publish data to it like so: